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02/11/2005:

"WAL-MART CHIEF VOWS TO BE 'EVERYWHERE WE ARE NOT'; SAYS EMPLOYEES DON'T NEED A UNION"

The chief executive of WAL-MART on Friday will defended the retailer's decision to close a Canadian store after its employees voted to form a union.

"You can't take a store that is a struggling store anyway and add a bunch of people and a bunch of work rules that cause you to even be in worse shape," H. Lee Scott Jr. explains in an interview set for Friday editions of the WASHINGTON POST.

Scott says WAL-MART saw no upside to the higher labor costs and refused to cede ground to the union for the sake of being "altruistic."

"It doesn't work that way," he said.

WAL-MART'S decision has infuriated the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which was negotiating a contract for the Quebec store's 190 employees. If it had succeeded, the store would have become the only WAL-MART store in North America with a union contract.

Scott says WAL-MART'S strategy for growth is to be "everywhere we are not."

In the United States, that means edging closer to major cities, such as Los Angeles, New York and Washington, where the chain is likely to find less land, higher costs and stiffer resistance from labor unions and neighborhood activists.
Full Article: drudgereport.com